Imagine if there were a repository of personas you could go to as a starting point for your own work? This was the idea that Steve Mulder and I had a few years ago. Now we are trying to make it happen. We need your help.

The ultimate vision is for a persona marketplace where people can submit personas they can share and browse personas that have been submitted. In the meantime, we'll post content in a blog format. We need volunteers willing to:

Some of you may know of the GNOME Desktop Environment. It's one of several projects to create a desktop experience for Unix-based systems like Linux, BSD, and so forth.

GNOME v3 is due to come out later this month, and it's arousing a certain amount of controversy. The designers behind the project have decided to remove the maximize and minimize buttons from application windows, and leave the resulting space blank. In order to maximize and minimize, you have to use the mouse or keyboard.

I'm a young graphic designer who recently made a theme for hacked Motorola Droids. While doing this I realized I didn't have nearly the creative freedom that I wanted, but also that the stock Android OS is really...really ugly and rough around the edges.

I'm curious if anyone would be interested in starting a team to make an overlay (entire new UI with set of system apps) for Android handsets and tablets. I don't code, but I know Android apps are coded in Java.

I've been doing a bit of thinking about "open systems". This is not the same thing (though related to) open source. In fact, I've been thinking of how IxDA itself exemplifies a lot of the properties of an open system.

I'm curious what people think about open systems: how do you define them for yourself and what are the examples you point to? What are examples when they are not appropriate?